520 Memoirs and Writings of Rabelais. _[Nov. 
acquirements display themselves in every, even the-most trifling,” par- 
ticulars. If he relate an anecdote, or introduce an episode’ (and there 
is no ancient or modern wit who does either with such felicity), he is 
sure to point it with parallel observations from the classics. Aristotle 
the hard-headed metaphysical Stagirite—is made to illustrate Prior's 
well-known story of Hans Carvel’s Ring; Plato endorses—to use a com- 
mercial phrase—a chapter upon noses ; and Longinus is brought forward 
as arguing upon the impropriety of paying debts. Besides his intimate 
acquaintance with the best writers of Greece and Rome, Rabelais-was 
familiar with the lawyers, physicians, and divines (that cloud of eccle- 
siastical locusts) of the lower empire, with the Pandects of Justinian, 
the metaphysical commentaries of Julian aud Boethius; the’ legal 
transcripts of Tribonian, and the historical frivolities of Anna Con 
menus. Thus he has something good to urge on every subject. He 
runs the whole circle of the sciences and belles lettres; throws off at 
one time a chapter on law, at another a dissertation on architecture— 
either of which would have set up a modern professor for life—and 
hurls the thunder of his sarcasm on all parties alike—on the church, 
the army, the senate, the universities, and alas! even on the blessed 
state of matrimony. Mixed up, however, with this heterogenous mass is 
one serious alloy ; and that is, the too frequent grossness of his allu- 
sions. That such was the custom of the country, argues little in 
extenuation of this defect: for there is in every age, in every language, 
a certain fixed moral standard of good taste ; not that conventional one 
which is adapted to the habits of a nation, but an instinctive appre- 
hension of right, that can never, except by determined perversity, be 
erased from the mind. Rabelais knew and acknowledged this; but in 
vanity he was a Frenchman; his book in order to sell must be spiced 
with gross allusions, and the priesthood, to which in early life he 
belonged, offered irresistible opportunities of ridicule. Another, but 
slighter defect, is his inveterate rage for punning. As Dr. Johnson said 
of Shakspeare, “ a pun was the Cleopatra for which he lost the 
empire of the world,”—so we may add of Rabelais, that'a pun is his 
undoubted ruin. Like some foul impediment, it stops the full stream of 
his imagination, dams up the current, and misdirects it into other 
channels. The reader of this desultory criticism will scarcely believe that 
there are frequent chapters in Rabelais where, in the course of relating 
one of his happiest anecdotes, he gets sight of some miserable verbal 
pun: away like a hunter he goes, chaces the phantom from sentence to 
sentence, from page to page, loses sight of his story and himself, and 
never once returns to it. And all this at a time when the fancy in 
most men has decayed; and the judgment, if it ever possessed 
influence, exercises it despotically over the mind! “Rabelais was full 
seventy years of age when he perpetrated the atrocious puns’ which 
disfigure the “ Holy Bottle.” In others this might be safely attributed 
to a creeping second childhood ; but the memory—the wit—the fire— 
the imagination of Rabelais, were never more conspicuous’ than in ‘this 
romance. We have mentioned his rage for punning, in order that the 
reader of his allegories may come to the perusal of its pages’ with a 
disposition prepared to extenuate (on the score of its other merits) such 
defects. Oe ae 
It is—we were going to say—surprising that a humorist like Rabelais | 
should be so-little known and appreciated in his imaginative, if not: 
